Microsoft has been making a lot of noise about its designs on cloud computing lately, and the company has now passed a significant milestone. Azure, the cloud-computing platform that only recently emerged from beta testing, now has more than 10,000 paying customers.

That's well ahead of what some industry analysts had been expecting from a player that's relatively new to the cloud arena. Datamation takes a look at the latest with Microsoft's Azure cloud platform.

Microsoft's Azure just came out of beta testing a few months ago, but the company has already signed up 10,000 paying customers to run their applications in the company's Azure cloud, a company executive said.

Azure, Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) fledgling cloud computing platform was free to customers during months of beta testing. However, that ended on Feb. 1 when vendors offering Azure-based services could begin charging for them and Microsoft started billing the vendors for providing Azure's application and service infrastructure.